1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique for automatically setting a printing apparatus to a dedicated machine for a specific destination, and more particularly to a destination dedicating apparatus, printing apparatus, print kiosk apparatus, destination dedicating method, and program therefore adopting the above technique.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, a printing apparatus is designed so that only specific consumable goods specified by a manufacturing or selling company of the printing apparatus can be used. For example, the printing apparatus is designed so that the shape of the specific consumable goods coincides with the shape of a consumable good mounting space defined in the printing apparatus. In recent years, there has been known a system such that an IC tag is mounted on a consumable good and only when destination information read from the IC tag coincides with destination information prepared in a printing apparatus, this consumable good is determined as an authorized consumable good.
The above system is effective not only in maintaining a print quality, but also in reducing the possibility of malfunction of the printing apparatus.
FIG. 1 shows the concept of the system in related art. An ink cartridge 3 is mounted into a printing apparatus 1 manufactured by Company A. As shown in FIG. 1, there are three kinds of ink cartridges 3 respectively dedicated to Companies A, B, and C. These ink cartridges 3 have the same shape corresponding to the shape of a mounting space defined in the printing apparatus 1, and include IC tags preliminarily storing the respective pieces of destination information. As shown in FIG. 1, only the ink cartridge 3 dedicated to Company A can be mounted into the printing apparatus 1 manufactured by Company A.
A technique for mounting such an IC tag on a consumable good is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2005-140896, for example.